There's More To You Than You Realize / 13 May 2022
Do We Create Or Discover Ourselves?
What role do we play in our own “becoming”?
Grief & Coping / 08 May 2022
Even After The Rituals, The Longing For My Mother Remains
The grief that remains after the rituals.
Art & Culture / 03 May 2022
A Rabbi’s Perspective On Jesus Christ Superstar
Why one rabbi is changing his mind about the show…
Building New Identities, Historic Profiles, Inspiring Story, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized / 13 Apr 2022
Pesach 2022
This week, we welcome the holiday of Passover, the holiday of freedom. During the Passover seder, we act out the story of our ancestors being redeemed from Egypt. In the Talmud, there’s also the idea that we are supposed to understand ourselves to have been redeemed from slavery, too. And there are those who take it one step further. Our ancestors were redeemed in ancient Egypt, we too were redeemed, and not only that: The 19th-century Chassidic Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter (commonly known by the name of his influential book, The Sefat Emet) teaches that each and every year we have the chance to be newly free – if we put in the spiritual work. He writes: “On every Passover, a Jew becomes like a new being like we were during the Exodus from Egypt; like a newborn child. The inner essence implanted by God within our hearts is renewed. That inner essence is called lechem ‘oni [poor people’s bread–a synonym for matzah] because it is totally without expansion. Matzah is just the essence of dough, which afterward changes and ferments. In the same way, every Jew has an inner essence, a gift from God. And actually, our usual task is to expand that point, to draw all our deeds to follow it. This is our job throughout the year, for better or worse. But when this Holiday of Matzot comes, it is the time when that inner essence itself is renewed and purified from all defilement. Therefore, we must guard it from any “ferment” or change on this holiday.” One way to take this is that matzah is our essential self, and bread (chametz) represents our poofed-up ego, what we are with all the trappings of identity and society on us. This is the one time of year when…
The first year of grief is time spent in a different country, a time of wild disjunctions and unfamiliar rhythms, of weeping and guilt and emotional tailspins. Loss fills the air you breathe, exerts itself all day, and then fills your dreams: even when you forget yourself long enough to think for a moment you’ve briefly stepped away, it doubles back on you. Loss is everywhere. And then, somehow, at some unpredictable point, things start to shift. There comes a moment when the utter irreversibility of death–which you knew all along–nonetheless sinks......
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Bring The Sacred Down To Earth, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
March 24, 2022
Silence Might Be Golden, But Shouting Goes Platinum
Birds Of Paradise, Strange Fire, And Separating The Signal From The Noise...
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Years ago, there was a small bookshop on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, near Brown University’s campus, called College Hill Bookstore. It had late hours – I recall the shop being open until eleven p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on the weekend – and its motto was: Dedicated to the fine art of browsing. The owner of the bookshop also owned (and still operates) a small movie theater a couple of doors down. Neither business could have been especially financially profitable for him. I spent many hours there in my......
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Another Way Of Looking At Things, Daily Life, Longform, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
March 16, 2022
To Forget And To Remember
There are some dark times that we commemorate in a ceremony with the reading of names. And there are some that result in celebrating with oily foods and candles. And there are some where we were so terrified, and now we are so out of our minds to have averted the decree, that we drink. We drink to forget. We don’t ever want to remember it was so awful. Blot out the memory. Forget the darkness. This is Purim. We tell our story of what we went through, and we are commanded......
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Breaking False Dichotomies, Compassion and Empathy, Longform, Mundane Into Sacred, This Week In Wisdom, Uncategorized |
March 10, 2022
Don’t Try To Be the Hero of Your Story
With two elementary-school-aged kids, we hear a fair amount of sibling fighting, with only some of it unprovoked. When one of them is getting a little too wild, and, say, someone’s limbs smack into someone else’s body, their first reaction is to say, “I didn’t mean to do it!” And while my wife and I do draw a distinction between purposeful versus accidental actions, we try to focus more on the consequences and how to make it right afterward. That’s what’s so striking about this week’s Torah portion, Vayikra. It outlines the......
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In this week’s Torah portion, Vayakheil, the master artisan Bezalel is putting together all the items for Mishkan, the dwelling-place for God. There are a whole host of materials listed – poles and pails, gratings and basins, fire pans, and fleshhooks, and most of them are presented simply as a list. But only one item has a backstory: “He made the laver of copper and its stand of copper, from the mirrors of the women who performed tasks at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting.” (Ex. 38:8) Unlike everything else that......
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Latest Video
Listen To The Names Of The Victims First
A video where Brad Hirschfield lists the victims names in the recent Orlando shooting. Because first we need to internalize a tragedy before we jump to speak.
